Journal

If I’m not on Facebook anymore, I want to take time to celebrate the things in life that I otherwise would post there, but in a way that is better suited to this blog of mine. I went through my pics and remembered this fluffy moment. This handsome gato is Napoleon. He is the sleekest and blackest of cats. He looks like he wandered out of the Wakandan ancestral plane. He is, without any doubt, my girlfriend Katharine’s actual god damn witch’s familiar.

Napoleon possesses a grace and dignity (and indignant reaction to being manhandled) that really read as being human. He wandered out of the wilderness into Katharine’s life when she was leaving in the mysterious East, and he made the journey with her to Illinois. He is an outdoor cat and will be no other thing as long as he lives. He does not strictly belong to her, as I say to the children – he really just comes and goes as he pleases, occasionally deigning to privilege us with his presence. The kids are deeply bemused that I insist on maintaining that he is, in fact, a wizard who has chosen the form of a cat.

(“Do wizards drink out of the toilet?” asked Katharine’s youngest, without skipping a beat.)

I will relate one story which I think sums him up perfectly, besides the picture, in which he is simply sitting on my notebook in protest, demanding affection. I was approaching Katharine’s house in the dark on foot not long ago. It was temperate outdoors and quiet, and a good night for the short walk over there. The neighbors have a porch light which clicks on when the motion sensor detects somebody moving along the driveway. It was pitch black out, and as I walked up the driveway, that light came on and, boom, there was Napoleon at my heel, as if he’d just appeared there by magic. He’ll often slink out of the bushes two or three houses down the block and trot along to accompany me to the house, or the girls home from the school that is literally right around the corner.

Katharine says that if ever there was a cat who looked like more than a cat – a powerful mage in disguise, or a trickster god – that cat would look like Napoleon. He really has made me see why the oldest stories shroud cats in mystery.

If you’re just joining me here on my blog, it might be because I spoke about it in my very last post on Facebook.

I made the decision to leave after some long deliberation and some consideration of how it would seem to people. In Red Planet, Heinlein introduces us to the martian species, and one thing about their culture is that withdrawing from everybody is cause for concern. They can roll themselves up into balls, basically shun the entire world. It’s a statement that says they don’t even want to acknowledge you’re there. It’s the ultimate rudeness. It’s a warning sign, like finding out somebody listens to Alex Jones.

So, that’s not how I want to look. But also, like, I’m sick of Facebook. It actively harms discourse and democracy, it has annihilated the news business, and it won’t implement a night mode for fuck’s sake.

At the same time, now I’ve quit it, I realize how integral it’s become to my life. I am going to need to reach out to all the people on it that I otherwise would not have kept up with. Some people I will lose touch with entirely because, if I’m honest, I didn’t care enough to keep up with them apart from through Facebook, which trades on its ability to make those little moments easy to trumpet to everybody you’ve ever tangentially known. I realize I will miss other people’s moments, too.

People got by without that in the past though, didn’t they? They went to high school reunions, they picked up a phone, they sent a letter and hoped the address hadn’t changed. I’ve resolved to try to do more of that. I used to send people a sort of email newsletter, back before Facebook.

This will mean that I get less validation from people when I have one of the little successes in life. When my father died last year, lots of people knew about it because of Facebook, and sent me condolences. When I get a new job or publish another article, a few likes come in.

And then, of course, there was my magnum opus: The two-year-long campaign I mounted to basically post about nothing but why people should vote out Bruce Rauner, the now governor-un-elect of Illinois. I’m really not going to be sorry to see that guy leave office. This was a joke I hammered so far into the ground that I surfaced at the point between Perth and Madagascar that is Springfield, Illinois’s antipode. Some people loved it. Some (Republican) people on my friends list probably hated it. I will publish it here whenever Facebook bothers to give me my god-shitting data – asked for it days ago.

I am “on” Twitter, but there’s no good reason to keep up the same stuff there, really. My messages are all public (they are here, too), and I could say something that gets me fired from writing a comic book, I guess.

Faced with a lack of that kind of easy conduit to just blabber bullshit, I have to reach out to people individually. And that is my goal in doing this, beyond being a nasty old crank who just can’t stand heaving a sigh and staying addicted to the scroll. I’ll need to write a letter, make a phone call, send a text, compose an email.

I will also write here more often (I promise). People compliment me on my writing and tell me it is witty, or funny, or the kind of angry they need to hear. That’s nice of them. But it’s also a performance where I can’t be entirely genuine for fear of offending this person or that institution. I’m old now, and don’t care to be anything but candid when I actually bother to sit down and write stuff.

Asking everybody to come here when they already have a place to go is being difficult. I’m sorry about that. But you know, I didn’t ask for Facebook, and over the years have tried to leave it before, and every time I’m dragged back. Perhaps I will be again, but I don’t want to be.

I’ve managed to get back into actual gaming again, as in tabletop roleplaying, where I am not the DM. It’s a pastime which I’ve missed. I’m enjoying the campaigns I’m in fairly well, but mostly I’m glad to have gotten back to thinking up and inhabiting a character again. What I’m reminded of is how the process of making an RPG character both can and cannot help you as you consider how to create a character for a fictional work.

Players in campaigns I run tell me they like my characters and stories and scenarios. I know that creating a character for a new game can seem daunting when you’ve got the books in front of you, so here’s some of my wisdom on how to go about it. Read more…

“Well, it was different back then than it is now. It was a thousand years ago. There was no electricity or airplanes or car insurance. There weren’t even any laws.”

She’s very surprised by this.

No laws?

“No. The only law was what the warlords said was the law. There wasn’t even really a king, because if somebody said he was king, every other warlord would argue with him and fight him with their big armies. The warlords could do and say whatever they wanted and nobody could stop them.”

There were no police?
“There were no police at all. The warlords were the ones who enforced whatever they said the law was in their little corner of the country, and if they were jerks about it, nobody could say anything. If they decided they didn’t like somebody, they could kill him for no reason. If they decided they wanted something somebody had, they could just steal it. And there were no courts to punish them.”

Good lord, the news is depressing. Crushing. Utterly infuriating. It’s exhausting even to peruse headlines these days.

It’s odd that, in the midst of such persistent gloom, I’ve retreated to playing some of the absolute most crushingly depressing games. Dark Souls 3 and Darkest Dungeon are games that openly antagonize you – games that layer mechanic atop mechanic and, once you’ve learned those mechanics, they throw you a curve ball. I am, in the middle of the above video, outraged to find that an update has apparently added a “stealth” mechanic to certain enemies in Darkest Dungeon.

But, as you’ll see above, just as they introduced it, I quickly discovered the ways to circumvent it and destroy such enemies inside of a few turns. There’s always hope.

I also, stupidly, watched Devilman Crybaby on Netflix, which is just not advisable if you don’t want to become a crybaby yourself. It is simultaneously so-dumb-it’s-brilliant anime and a sobering reflection on the dark tendencies of humanity. As in, what you don’t need right now.

I’m going to defeat Darkest Dungeon, guys. It mocks me. It digs its claws into me. But I beat TWO bosses just sitting down last night, after months of throwing the game aside. You’ve just got to work through the fear, trust that you know what you’re doing, stay frosty, and don’t give up hope.

So, I haven’t actually really elaborated much on exactly what Project Dawn is intended to be. Put simply, it’s my attempt at a dark fantasy game, put within a traditional JRPG framework (because that’s what I can currently program). I’ve been inspired lately by the copious amount of mythology and comparative mythology I’ve read, ancient world history I’ve studied, and games like Darkest Dungeon and Dark Souls. As I begin the long process of what I hope to be a fully playable, fully-featured game, here are some of the things I want to implement in it, and what it means for my process as I build this in the robust game engine that is RPG Maker MV: Read more…

One of the subject areas I come back to time and again is mythology. If you look at the various branches of humanity, consider how far apart they were, and then look at the similarities between major cultural mythological cycles. That they have so much in common, particularly the Indo-European mythological cycles like the Vedic, Celtic, Greek and Norse stories, seems to indicate that there’s something deeply similar across cultures. We’re talking about stories that came to their tellers in the time when the world was only what you saw, and the chilling nightmares you imagined.

The fact this sits at the root of works of fantasy like Tolkien’s Legendarium, the forefather of all role-playing games as we know them today, makes old mythology a sort of progenitor of the branch of gaming I’m interested in adding to. I’ve also been playing a bit of Dark Souls 3 again, and well… it does unhealthy things to somebody’s thought process where obsession over legends and stories are concerned. I think it might be why I’m incorporating mythology into my game. Read more…

Whenever I boot up a truly old game, something of the original experience is lost, and I don’t just mean because I’m playing it on a backwards-compatible PlayStation 2 hooked up to a high-def television that doesn’t give any fucks about its aspect ratio and anti-aliasing. This time, what was lost was any sense of awe I had about the story. Come with me on this sad journey as I talk about how a tale that once held me enraptured has become something I mash the “X” button to skip. Read more…

The AV Club must have heard of my recent squawking about Death Wish, because they just hit the full series with the sledgehammer of a close reading. And of course, they did better than I did. Check it out.

I’m still yakking about Outlaws, which still stands the test of time as #2 in the Top Two Western Video Games That Have Ever Been Made. Seriously, game industry, I’m pretty sure people would buy more of these. This video does a quick tour of Levels 1 and 2 and sums up Level 3 with the words “Ah, fuck, a train level.”